Ask HN: Why so many SEO posts all of a sudden?

[ilamont]

This morning I have observed three SEO posts in the top 15 links on Hacker News:

- Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White

- Some SEO Advice For Bill Gates

- Strategic SEO for Startups

Is this a coincidence, or can it be explained by something else, such as a sudden influx of SEO types to this forum?

[jacquesm]

It's not just SEO, it is practically any subject on HN that gets a periodic wave of interest.

I think it is simply tied in to the nature of the web. If you 'inject' a bunch of users via a link on HN in to a spot on the web then from there they will spread like sinking a mineshaft will exhaust the resources in the neighbourhood of the shaft.

Then, when that particular mine is exhausted (no more interesting content to be found around that locus in the web) the subject dies down until someone finds a new and untapped reservoir.

I've seen this happen around all kinds of subjects, from programming languages to hardware hacks and political stuff.

[TrevorJ → jacquesm]

That is a really interesting analogy, I would have never thought of it in that regard.

[mattmanser]

The first post submitted had a link to at least one of those other sites. Then I guess some HN people went through the linked sites and submitted stuff they found interesting.

Happens all the time, a fairly unknown blog gets submitted, then all of a sudden two or three more posts from that blog pop up on HN as people start exploring the new content (well, new to them). I've also noticed it happens to unknown stories linked in blogs.

[nsrivast → mattmanser]

As a result, the subject of submissions is autocorrelated. I wonder if this could be visualized using this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048866

[patio11]

Phase one: spend a year here, amassing 16k karma by being mostly helpful and well informed.

Phase two: write a post on a favorite topic I havent covered in a while.

Phase three: lure a cynical,disinterested, and not really wealthy audience to my blog.

Phase four: while you are not on HN, wage a sudden takeover by SEO content. After that it was all over but the cackling.

[jcromartie]

SEO.

[ntoshev → jcromartie]

Why the downvotes?

Practically everyone who sells SEO services has a blog explaining what is SEO, how it works and why you should hire him. These blogs are SEO'd to the maximum of the owner's ability, of course. What I hate about these articles is that they are optimized for indexers, not humans: the explanations doesn't make much sense but they try to cram in all the relevant keywords. Interestingly, this works well also with humans in a short-attention-span mode: you would think the article is useful if you just skim through it.

I have stopped reading anything mentioning SEO in the title so this may not be the case with the mentioned articles, but it is the explanation why I stopped reading them: the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad.

[boundlessdreamz → ntoshev]

the article by patio11 (startup seo) was really good and was well written. Not everything can be dismissed outright :)

[CoryMathews]

To me most SEO articles = Spam. Thus when I see a lot more articles I just assume o yey more spam.

[kf]

Maybe because lots of people who like SEO read these forums? At a certain amount of users, sub-interests can gain a voting-block like effect. We'd need to see more data about increased SEO posts to know for sure though.

[chaosmachine]

If people see a particular topic being upvoted, they're more likely to submit articles on that topic.

[c00p3r]

Because it is not a next big thing anymore and even teenagers can do it. And because google itself is just a mainstream. =) "The main navigation system" as some clever guy named it.